Candida Lycett Green was an author and journalist who shared with her father,
Sir John Betjeman, a passion for conserving England’s architectural heritage

Candida Lycett Green, the writer, who has died aged 71, was the daughter of the Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman (1906-84), the editor of his collected letters, and in the 1960s a noted beauty .

She fully shared her father’s commitment to protecting the nation’s vanishing architectural heritage, particularly Victorian, and after his death in 1984 she carried the flame forward with energy and fervour, and never more so than after being diagnosed with cancer in 1999.

Books such as Goodbye London (1972), England: Travels Through An Unwrecked Landscape (1996) and Unwrecked England (2009) flowed from her pen, and for several years she produced a monthly article under the heading “Unwrecked England” for The Oldie magazine. “I am the archetypal Anglophile,” she wrote, “and remain, like Ruskin, ever faithful to 'blind, tormented, unwearied, marvellous England’. For me it is the most beautiful country in the world.”

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This almost fogeyish persona contrasted with the one presented by the tall, lissom blonde Candida Lycett Green in the 1960s, when she and her Old Etonian husband, Rupert Lycett Green, were at the heart of the London party scene. Candida was an habitué of the Establishment Club, where she was photographed with the actor Terence Stamp; Rupert was the founder of Blades, the fashionable gentlemen’s outfitters in Mayfair. Ossie Clark designed Candida’s dresses, and David Hockney painted her portrait . In a reference to Candida’s reputation for minting sardonic witticisms, the couple were known as “Tailor and Cutter”.

As editor of her father’s letters, Candida Lycett Green did not consider herself a particularly meticulous scholar but rather a voracious snapper-up of his considered and unconsidered trifles. The writer and poet Blake Morrison delighted in her “often dotty and Betjemanic” footnotes, and found that her affectionate linking passages between the sections “add up to a charming memoir in themselves”.

In the first of two hefty volumes, John Betjeman Letters, 1926-1951 (1994), she recalled that all his working life her father had been strapped for cash. In the 1960s, when his fame was well-established, he had sold all his papers and letters — past and future — to the highest bidder, the newly created University of Victoria in British Columbia. In February 1992 Candida travelled to Victoria, and in the university’s McPherson Library “found several corridors of grey four-drawer filing cabinets containing, as it were, my father”.

Closeted in her allotted researcher’s cubbyhole, Candida Lycett Green found her father’s life tumbling out across the table in front of her — “notes from Oxford friends, garage bills, rockets from librarians for not returning books” — and she returned to England with more than 2,000 photocopies of letters to her father (there were about 50,000 altogether).

Once home, she advertised for her father’s outgoing letters and wrote to hundreds of universities and libraries as well as to 420 individuals. The response was huge and humbling. She received hundreds of letters, not just from friends and acquaintances but also from strangers. “It was like Christmas every morning,” she recalled, “and this lasted for at least four months. A whole new life began to evolve.”

The first volume of her father’s letters covered his life in London and Oxford and at his parents’ holiday home at Trebetherick, Cornwall; his marriage to her mother, Penelope Chetwode, and their early years together in Uffington, Ireland and Farnborough. Volume two, John Betjeman Letters, 1951-1984 (1995), began with the family’s move to Wantage in Berkshire and her father taking a small flat at 43 Cloth Fair in the City of London.

Candida admitted that her task as editor had been sadder and harder than before, when for the most part she had stood apart from the people and events described in her father’s correspondence. Now she found that she was fully conscious of, and completely involved with, her subject.

The second volume of letters was also difficult to compile because in the 1960s Betjeman’s abysmal handwriting had become almost indecipherable even to the most practised transcribers. Then there was the sheer volume of documents, which she said would fill an articulated lorry. When she returned to the University of Victoria in British Columbia for a second time, she was faced with distilling the essence of her father’s life from no fewer than 30,000 letters that she had not seen two years before.

Candida Lycett Green in the garden of her home in Wiltshire (Andrew Crowley)

Candida Rose Betjeman was born on September 22 1942 in Dublin, where John Betjeman was planning to spend the war as press attaché to the British representative in the Irish Republic. But the family returned to Britain the following year, and his daughter spent her infancy at Garrards Farm, the rented, chaotic family home near Wantage that Evelyn Waugh complained smelled like a village shop: “oil, cheese, bacon, washing… A horse sleeps in the kitchen.”

Furthermore, the family goat, Snowdrop, was allowed the run of the house, which was hung with Pre-Raphaelite paintings, decorated with William Morris wallpapers and lit solely by oil lamps. The infant’s maternal grandfather, Field Marshal Lord Chetwode, would never stay under his daughter’s roof, always putting up at a pub across the road, unable to stand “those stinkin’ lamps”.

When Candida was three, the family moved again, to the Old Rectory at Farnborough, a remote village on the Berkshire downs that became “my favourite place on earth”. A pretty, fair-haired child, she was her father’s pet; he called her “Wibz”. The girl showed early literary talent, and made her father laugh with an early limerick: “Wibberley Wobberley Wib/She blew up her dad with a squib/And when he was dead/She cut off his head/And scratched on his face with a nib.”

Candida’s mother, Penelope, newly converted to Roman Catholicism, regularly took Candida to Mass while allowing her to remain at a local Anglican primary school, where she mixed with local children and acquired a Berkshire accent which she shed completely only when she was in her teens. As a girl she learned to love the pace of life on horseback, “wandering through villages, the backs of towns… looking into gardens and watching other people’s lives”.

According to her father’s biographer, Bevis Hillier, Candida never forgave her parents for moving from their beautiful Georgian rectory downhill to red-brick Wantage and a Victorian house called The Mead, which she hated. But she was allowed to be naughtier than her contemporaries, mainly on account of the benign neglectfulness of her parents. “I’m sure it came as a shock to John, sometimes, to realise he’d got children,” a neighbour remarked.

After boarding at St Mary’s, Wantage, Candida left in 1957 at the age of 15. She enjoyed extended cultural holidays in Paris and Rome, and in 1958 spent some months with a French family in the Haute-Loire area of central France, attending the local school and complaining about the stern, unbending teaching methods there. The following year she went to Rome to study architecture, and at New Year 1960 returned to Italy again to recover from a failed love affair.

At 17 she was sending reams of “appallingly bad” poetry to her father in England for his critical verdict; she always found him a good listener. After a year’s sojourn in Ireland in 1961, she came out as a debutante, much to the disapproval of her father, who thought she would be better off finding a job. Candida decided in the circumstances to flee the family nest and moved to Oxford, where she studied sculpture at the city’s technical college and, in a greasy-spoon café called the Town and Gown, mooned after Richard Ingrams, with whom she later helped launch Private Eye in London.

Her start in journalism was unpromising. Having persuaded Queen magazine to give her a job as an £8-a-week sub-editor, writing captions under pictures of fur coats and jewellery, she was fired in September 1962 by the owner, Jocelyn Stevens, who had discovered that in the evenings Candida was moonlighting on the Eye, stapling the magazine’s pages together to prepare it for distribution.

Later that autumn she was a guest at a house party at a palazzo in Venice thrown by Simon Hornby, one of her many admirers and subsequently chairman of WH Smith, and there she met and fell in love with the handsome Rupert Lycett Green. Back home, while Candida was working in north Wales for Richard Hughes, author of A High Wind In Jamaica (1929), she and Rupert became engaged. They married in May 1963, and after a honeymoon at Ravello spent a year driving around the world in a customised Land Rover. On their return, her husband founded Blades, with premises in Savile Row. (He sold it in 1981.)

Candida Lycett Green with her father on her wedding day in 1963 (TOPFOTO.CO.UK)

The Lycett Greens set up home in the then deeply unfashionable area of Notting Hill. Candida decorated it in the “boho” style, and installed, in the basement, one of the first country kitchens in London. Its “pine look” commended itself to art directors, who used it as a film location for commercials ranging from Hovis bread to Viyella shirts. The L-shaped drawing room was painted emerald green and furnished with purple sofas.

After its faltering start, Candida’s journalistic career began to flourish. In June 1970 the Evening Standard sent her to Mexico to report on the football World Cup from a woman’s angle. As the decade progressed, she succeeded her father as steward of the “Nooks and Corners” column that he had started in Private Eye, and revealed an unsuspected talent for investigative reporting; she was once threatened with physical violence by a rogue building “developer”, and was the first woman to become a regular Eye contributor.

In 1974 she and her husband moved to Blacklands, near Calne, a large, crumbling Georgian house overlooking the Marlborough downs whose top two floors had been gutted by fire. To help finance the renovation and improvements, Candida sold Hockney’s portrait of her , paying for a tennis court in the garden.

When the couple hosted a 70th birthday party for her father at Blacklands in the blisteringly hot summer of 1976, Candida noted how heavily the poet leaned on his wife’s arm, and that he had become “pretty wobbly”.

It was John Betjeman’s idea that his daughter’s book The Front Garden (1974), compiled with the photographer Christopher Simon Sykes, would make an interesting television film. Candida Lycett Green presented it on Christmas Day 1978, the film having been directed by Eddie Mirzoeff and shot by Philip Bonham-Carter, John Betjeman’s own regular television team. Mirzoeff suggested that she make another film with him, the result being The English Woman and the Horse (1981).

She continued to turn out more books with a rural theme, including A Cottage in the Country (1983), English Cottages (1984), Brilliant Gardens (1989), The Perfect English Country House (1991) and Seaside Resorts (2011). In the 1990s she served on the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England.

In 1997 Candida Lycett Green edited an anthology of her father’s prose, Coming Home, and in 1999 an anthology of prose and verse, Betjeman’s Britain.

After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, she produced The Garden at Highgrove (2000), a book she deliberately signed up for as a project to sustain her and which she shared with her friend the Prince of Wales. Her memoir of growing up in rural Berkshire, The Dangerous Edge of Things, appeared in 2005.

Candida Lycett Green, a lifelong horsewoman, continued to take a week or two off each year, as she had done for 30 years, to ride all over England. She reckoned that she had covered more than 3,000 miles “touring England by horse” . In August 2000 she rode from Yorkshire to north Northumberland, a sponsored ride of 170 miles that raised £125,000 for the Abernethy Cancer Centre at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, where she was treated. She recounted the journey in another memoir, Over the Hills and Far Away (2002).

She had made plans for her funeral. “Axl [her horse] is going to pull our green trolley cart with a wooden coffin with horseshoes, and there are going to be gospel singers singing O Happy Day and a huge wake, with lots of dancing. I’ve got it all sorted — one might as well.”

She is survived by Rupert Lycett Green and by three daughters and two sons.